Julia Bullock @ Vocal Arts

L. Bernstein, West Side Story, J. Bullock (inter alii), San Francisco Symphony, M. Tilson Thomas (Chandos, 2011)

Charles T. Downey, Julia Bullock shows almost any song can soar in her capable vocal cords (Washington Post, April 20)

The recital by Julia Bullock, presented by Vocal Arts D.C. in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Monday evening, had many things going for it. The American soprano had a winning stage presence, a diverse and eclectic program, and a crackerjack musical partner in pianist Renate Rohlfing. It was easy to see why she has become the darling of many critics.

Bullock’s sparkly persona went a long way in selling experimental songs by Henry Cowell and John Cage. The former’s “How Old Is Song?” had Rohlfing directly strumming and plucking the piano strings like the harp of Orpheus, and in the latter’s “She is Asleep,” Bullock’s primordial, wordless vocalise was accompanied by the unexpected percussive sounds of Rohlfing’s piano. Bullock excelled when she had a character to incarnate, most vividly in a set of half-spoken cabaret songs by Kurt Weill and when she felt a connection to music “that is authentic to me,” as she put it. William Grant Still’s “Breath of a Rose” was gorgeous, as were two prayerful arrangements of spirituals by Hall Johnson and Harry T. Burleigh. She could even charm when singing texts that were basically nonsensical, like Cowell’s “Because the Cat” and Samuel Barber’s “Nuvoletta.”

In the other art songs on the program, her voice sounded less natural, heavy at the bottom and slightly strained at the top, with an intensely fluttering vibrato that sometimes caused the intonation to sag flat. In Ravel’s charming “Cinq melodies populaires grecques,” her swagger in the male-voiced songs “Quel galant m’est comparable” and “Tout gai!” was a hoot, but her voice did not lift effortlessly off the ground in the others, nor in a set of Scandinavian songs by Wilhelm Stenhammar and Edvard Grieg.

Julia Bullock, soprano
Renate Rohlfing, piano
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

SEE ALSO:
Sarah Bryan Miller, Soprano Julia Bullock gives a virtuoso recital (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 31)

---, Soprano Julia Bullock returns to her hometown with a recital (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 27)

David Greilsammer Pairs Scarlatti and Cage

Mozart, Early Piano Concertos (K. 175, 238, 246), D. Greilsammer, Suedama Ensemble (2008)

We have taken note of David Greilsammer before, on a disc of the early Mozart concerti with the Suedama Ensemble. The Jerusalem-born pianist made his Washington recital debut on Saturday afternoon, presented by Washington Performing Arts Society at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. The concept behind the concert was intriguing, a program that alternates between sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti on modern piano and others by John Cage on prepared piano. This makes sense, since both composers wrote sonatas that are compact, animated by rhythm, freely colored with folk music tinges, and virtuosic. Greilsammer mistakenly added largely unneeded, more extravagant musings in a short program note ("Scarlatti and Cage conceived these pieces to be the messengers of a yet unknown world, [...] like an Unidentified Flying Object, passing in the sky") and in a tediously long spoken introduction to this hour-long concert.

Greilsammer then set about bending the two composers' pieces toward one another. To the Scarlatti sonatas he applied all sorts of dynamic twisting, using the soft pedal to achieve ghostly effects, taking unusual tempo choices, and slathering on rubato. The modern piano, of course, has all sorts of expressive possibilities that were not part of what Scarlatti was trying to do, since his sonatas were to be played mostly on the harpsichord. K. 213 was almost without sound so softly was it played, at a slow tempo, some of the notes almost not sounding at all. K. 141, by contrast, was taken extremely fast, so much that some of the notes were sort of half-articulated by Greilsammer's fingers, especially the guitar-like repeated-note motifs, making the hand crossings, such a signature for Scarlatti, difficult to make understood aurally. K. 87, on the other hand, felt flattened out, with the echo effects sort of mechanically nullified, the better to go with its Cage companion. The sustaining pedal obscured most of the details of K. 381, and K. 175 had a chaotic lack of regular pulse at times, making for a badly affected result.

Other Reviews: Simon Chin, David Greilsammer: Lots of adventurousness, and some missteps, in Terrace Theater recital (Washington Post, January 13)

To make the alternation of composers seamless, Greilsammer sat between the prepared and regular pianos, which faced each other, keyboard to keyboard. Pivoting on a stool and dropping the music for each piece on the floor -- a distracting gesture that could be easily remedied through memorization of the music -- he sometimes leapt from Scarlatti to Cage, or vice versa, with almost no break. Cage's preparation of the piano limits the performer's ability to control the sound, so Greilsammer could do less in these pieces to bring them closer to Scarlatti, but he gave them as much expressive shape as he could. These are some of my favorite pieces by Cage, a composer whose later music mostly vexes me, and Greilsammer played them well, and the programming often aligned key centers and even motifs between the two composers' pieces. The least apt of the pairings was Cage's no. 11 and Scarlatti's K. 531, both so slow that most of the excitement was missed, especially the latter, which lost of all of its sparkling trumpet fanfare-like qualities. Overall this was a concept that worked better on paper than in practice.

The next concert from WPAS will feature cellist Alisa Weilerstein (January 19, 7:30 pm), at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

New Music Triple Bill at the Atlas

In back-to-back concerts Friday night, the Atlas Performing Arts Center presented three of New York’s hottest new music ensembles, cementing its own reputation as one of the finest venues for contemporary music in Washington, D.C.

First, in the main theater, Sō Percussion played an assemblage of works by John Cage and more recent composers. The pieces were played seamlessly alongside and atop one another, in a model of what an inspired Cage tribute can be. Cage once avowed “a greater interest in quantity than in quality. If you have a large enough number of things, judgment decreases and curiosity increases.” As it was, the great quantity of sounds produced by Sō Percussion were also of impeccable quality. Some stood out, like Needles, a group composition by Sō Percussion and the electronic duo Matmos, which featured amplified cactus. It sounded at first like soldiers marching briskly over cobblestones, but soon the addition of whimsical electronic sounds and danceable counter-rhythms replaced the image of a menacing army with that of a fabulous high-stepping flag troupe. Use by Cenk Ergün presented the muffled scrapings and stirrings you might hear if you were a barnacle attached to a sailboat's hull. In Dan Deacon’s Bottles, a series of those objects in various sizes, suspended like gongs and amplified, were played and then emptied with the measured sobriety of a Shinto temple ritual.

The quantity of sounds was greatly augmented when, simultaneously with four Cage pieces, the entire packed house (press included) was enlisted in a performance of Deacon’s Take a Deep Breath. Following instructions in the program, we sighed, sang, and stomped, squeaked and squawked, made phone calls, surfed YouTube, and switched seats. Parents appreciatively abandoned all pretense of restraining their gleeful children (of which there were an impressive number). It was wonderful.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, So Percussion, ACME and yMusic showcase new sounds (Washington Post, December 3) Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, So Percussion’s Limited-Edition John Cage Project (New York Times, November 23) Royce Akers Akers, Rob Moose from yMusic Seems Friendly and Smart Like You'd Expect (VICE, November 20)

Next, the Library of Congress presented ensembles ACME and yMusic in the Atlas’s smaller Sprenger Theater, where tables and a bar, along with the genial commentary of violist Nadia Sirota (member of both groups), created an uncommonly intimate atmosphere. A standout of ACME’s performance was Don Byron’s Spin, a violin and piano duet commissioned by the Library’s McKim fund. Its sharply contrasting sections ranged from aggressive Bartókian moto perpetuo to shimmering, jazzy harmonies executed elegantly by pianist Timothy Andres. Cage was present again, with the String Quartet in Four Parts. It was the Washington area’s second chance in as many months to hear this sparse, detached work, though here gentle amplification allowed one to get inside the music more.

Finally yMusic played a selection of their repertoire, which includes works by artists from Indie rock acts such as St. Vincent and Son Lux. These pop- and minimalist-inflected pieces were performed with warmth and skill by the six musicians, four of whom doubled or tripled smoothly on different instruments. Jeremy Turner’s The Bear and the Squirrel sounded like a contemporary version of a lush Mahlerian adagio. Andrew Norman’s well-crafted Music in Circles, receiving the premiere of its revised version, started out with hushed, wispy sounds like those of a distant passing jet, and ended that way, too, after a churning, melancholy middle. Finally, the enchanting harmonies and sprightly, irregular rhythmic hooks of Judd Greenstein’s Clearing, Dawn, Dance were a fitting coda to a rich night of music.

Cage 100, Part 4: Cage's Influence

The official closing concert of the week's John Cage Centennial Festival came on Sunday night at the National Gallery of Art. A varied program, filling out the festival's retrospective of Cage's oeuvre, was staged in the atrium of the museum's East Building, a space that has not always been successful for concertizing but which suited this performance quite beautifully, especially because of the role of spatialization issues in some of the works featured. I stand by my dividing line for Cage's works at about the year 1960, the point at which, to my ears, Cage became too obsessed with chance determinations and the negation of traditional musical parameters (rhythm and meter, melody, harmony) for his own good. Imaginary Landscape No. 4, a piece for 24 players controlling 12 transistor radios, from 1951, was lighthearted fun, its pulse indicated by a conductor and completely random sounds swooping in and out in crescendos and overlapping entrances. Contrary to what some people might think, given how often he used transistor radios, Cage did not like radios and embraced them as a way to hand over control beyond his own tastes. The goal, he once said, was to "erase all will and the very idea of success."

Technology was also a way to introduce random elements into his music without allowing human associations to creep in, through improvisation. The Cage exhibit at American University's Katzen Arts Center is worth seeing, not so much for the composer's artwork (noteworthy because it was created by Cage, more than for its own merits) but because of the other documents, including the manuscripts and typescript versions of the score of 4'33". Another document in the exhibit is a typewritten letter from October 17, 1963, addressed by Cage to Leonard Bernstein ("Dear Lenny," it begins), who was then performing Cage's music (and that of others) on a concert that incorporated improvisation, as a way to show the freedom Cage introduced into his music. This irked Cage so much that he wrote, rather sternly, "Improvisation is not related to what the three of us [Cage, Feldman, Brown] are doing in our works. It gives free play to the exercise of taste and memory, and it is exactly this that we, in differing ways, are not doing in our music."

Pianist Stephen Drury played Cage's prepared piano piece Music for "Works of Calder", from 1949-50, a spell-binding play of gamelan gong-like sounds and other cymbal-like or bell-like tones, punctuated by stretches of silence, with Calder's enormous site-specific mobile looming overhead. The rhythmically energized section of this piece, with a bouncy ostinato, was a reminder of the loss Cage imposed on himself in later works by eliminating rhythm in favor of duration. Cartridge Music, from 1960, was rendered on all sorts of amplified doodads, including a piece of tape ripped up from the table surface and Slinkys suspended from microphone stands, definitely at the edge of trying as one tried to make sense of the work, determined as it was by dots on star charts. Worst of all was the final Cage work, Ryoanji (1983-92), related to three prints Cage made from tracings of the rocks in the Zen garden of the Ryoanji Buddhist temple in Kyoto (on exhibit in the Concourse). The same chord, slightly altered, is repeated countless times, with amplified cello (and cellist's voice) moaning in the background, the kind of Cage piece that is annoyingly tiresome.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, Cage festival closes on some fitting notes (Washington Post, September 11) Cage Festival: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

A set of pieces by composers influenced by or who influenced Cage was a nice touch, including Henry Cowell's rather gorgeous Tides of Manaunaun (1917), heard live for the second time this year and played here, somewhat haltingly, by Margaret Leng Tan. Robert Ashley's Resonant Combinations featured composer Roger Reynolds producing overtones on a piano on the floor, with the partials hovering in ghostly ways as instrumentalists placed around the atrium took them up in the distance. Tan also performed a new piece by Reynolds, OPPOrTuniTy, which involved the building up of a cluster on prepared piano and the shouting of fragments of the name "John," which had the effect of a seance summons, a welcome example of whimsy from the normally far too serious Reynolds. George Lewis's new work Merce and Baby attempted to recreate the collaboration of Merce Cunningham and the jazz drummer Baby Dodds, with the catchy transcription of Dodds's spiffy solos stealing the show. Pianist Jenny Lin gave Steve Antosca's evocation, also from 2012, a busy energy, although the piece seemed to evoke Prokofiev's second sonata more than Cage until its eerie, buzzing conclusion, produced by pieces of twine pulled through the piano's strings.

Cage 100, Part 3: Stephen Drury

Charles T. Downey, A Cage listeners may want to escape
Washington Post, September 10, 2012

Cage, Works for Piano, Vol. 1, S. Drury

The composer Ernst Krenek diagnosed the problem of modernism in the 1950s. As translated into English a decade later, he wrote: “Performances of new music take place in an atmosphere dominated by specialists . . . [who] do not go to an art-work for a total emotional experience; they are interested in the demonstration of new materials, new principles of composition, procedures, methods. . . . This creates a danger of a radicalization that will accelerate continuously.”

Nowhere does Krenek seem to have hit the nail on the head more squarely than with the music of John Cage, which is being celebrated this week in a centennial festival at small museum venues throughout the city. As demonstrated by a brief survey of Cage’s work for piano, played masterfully and elegantly by Stephen Drury on Saturday afternoon at the Kreeger Museum, Cage’s compositions became more radical, enthralled to more-stringent theory, and less tolerable to the ear over the course of his career. [Continue reading]

Stephen Drury, piano
John Cage Centennial Festival
Kreeger Museum

Works by John Cage:
Prelude for Meditation (1944)
Music for Piano 1 (1952)
Variations II (1961, realization by David Tudor)
4'33" (1952)
In a Landscape (1948)
Etudes Australes, Book III (1974-75)
+ Philip Glass, Modern Love Waltz (1977, rev. 2012)

SEE ALSO:
Cage 100, Part 1 and Part 2

Cage 100, Part 2: Freeman Etudes

J. Cage, Freeman Etudes, Books 1 and 2, I. Arditti (1993) J. Cage, Freeman Etudes, Books 3 and 4, I. Arditti (1994)

John Cage (1912-1992) would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Wednesday, and Washington's museums have come together to host a series of performances for the John Cage Centennial Festival over the next several days. On Thursday evening, the Phillips Collection got in on the act, with a solo recital by violinist Irvine Arditti that was billed as the "American premiere" of Cage's mind-blowing virtuosic showdown, the Freeman Etudes (the program clarified that it was Arditti's first American performance of the complete set). As described in a study by James Pritchett, Cage began this set of etudes for solo violin at the request of Betty Freeman in 1977, with Paul Zukofsky in mind as the performer. When Zukofsky pronounced the work unplayable -- probably on some level one of the things that the composer was hoping to achieve, music so detailed, with all of those details generated by chance operations, that it could not be played -- Cage halted composition at the end of the second book, only to take it up again when Irvine Arditti expressed an interest, expanding it to four books.

Cage followed a painstaking process to create the work, beginning by tracing points on star charts to determine the initial pitch and duration. Cage assigned all other performance parameters with a series of chance determinations -- articulation, dynamics, unusual effects -- that also indicated the series of pitches that he would follow. Pritchett, who studied this score in great detail and was the one who helped Cage reconstruct his long-forgotten method when he took the etudes back up, estimates that "each note of each etude is thus the product of hundreds of different chance operations." The result, lasting around ninety excruciating minutes without a break, is multifariously perverse, in the lovably eye-twinkling way that only Cage could muster. The compositional plan is a sort of anti-composition, akin to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. A computer could be fed the pattern of random generators used by Cage and spit out another thirty-two Freeman Etudes. No note can be connected to any other note to make a melody or a form, by the composer's own design, reducing the performer to an assembler of random sound objects.

There is really no way to critique such a performance, either. The act of deciphering the score -- take a look at this excerpt of the score of Etude 18, and your eyes will cross -- to try to determine if the performer is actually hitting each note on pitch (or off pitch, as some notes are required to be), with the right dynamic, pitch distortion, number of ricochet bounces, and so on, is impossible. Arditti could play a rough approximation of the score and almost no one would know the difference. In fact, Arditti had to do just that at the end of one of the etudes, when his highest string broke under the pressure of all those scratches, squeaks, and squawks. To his credit, Arditti soldiered on, playing something vaguely resembling the piece, impossible to render correctly with the three strings he still had. (Returning from the green room with his restrung instrument, he observed drolly, "I only have two E strings left.")

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, ‘Freeman Etudes’ at the Phillips (Washington Post, September 8) Previously:Michael Lodico, Cage 100, Part 1: John Cage sans champignons (Ionarts, September 7)

The piece is often hailed as virtuosic, and the vociferous ovation from the specialist audience -- some of whom had zoned out or even slept for much of the performance -- was an appreciation of Arditti's accomplishment. To think of the work in those terms, to my mind, is to misunderstand what Cage was after on a fundamental level. The question of whether the piece is unplayable is actually irrelevant, since most listeners, if they are honest, have no way to assess if a performance is good or bad. The concept of virtuosity requires three things: challenging music, a talented performer who attempts to play it, and an audience that can distinguish whether the performer was up to the challenge or not. Without that last part, virtuosity is beside the point, and that seems to me exactly what John Cage was saying by writing this music and calling it, to make the irony explicit, "etudes" (the same goes for the Etudes Australes and Etudes Boreales). Rather than trying to assess if this music is unplayable, it seems to me that the real question is whether this music is unlistenable. I cede the point that Cage's ideas have been influential, but I refuse to admit that the experience of listening to these pieces is more about beauty or pleasure than it is about endurance.

Cage 100, Part 1: John Cage sans champignons

Wednesday evening for a full house, the Contemporary Series at La Maison Française, in conjunction with the John Cage Centennial Festival, presented a tribute evening led by French cellist Alexis Descharmes. For the most part, contemporary works by Cage, Beat Furrer, Pierre Boulez, and Klaus Huber were paired with Descharmes's own instrumental arrangements of piano music by Erik Satie, a composer Cage held in high esteem. There is an apparent "proximity to silence" that these composers share. High points of the program included a 1982 letter from Pierre Boulez to John Cage, recorded in French and English by French actor Michael Lonsdale, that spoke of "keeping freshness for times to come." This letter was followed by Boulez's own tour-de-force Messagesquisse for cello and cello ensemble (though Descharmes recorded their parts himself), where the patron's name, Sacher, is spelled both melodically (E flat-A-C-B-E-D) and rhythmically through vivacious morse code.

A visual dimension was added when Descharmes shared 200 closeup photos of Gerhard Richter's series of six paintings titled Cage on a big screen overhead. Descharmes rigged the slides to change whenever he tapped his foot on a pedal -- every 7 to 10 seconds on average -- while performing Cage's extended Music for Two with violinist Irvine Arditti. The colorful, visibly raw brush strokes paired cogently with the bow strokes of the string players, who used stopwatches to pace their respective periods of silence and movement. While pianist Jenny Lin's approach to the Satie Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes was refreshing to the overall tone (or lack thereof) of the program, Descharmes idea of adding string and clarinet parts often undermined the works. In these slow works, Satie masterfully combats the decay of the piano by having accompanimental chords subtly sustain melodic notes. The expressive clarinet (Bill Kalinkos) and string players (Lina Bahn with Descharmes) tended to push the intensity of long notes in a way that moved the character of these pieces away from the proximity of silence.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, Cellist Alexis Descharmes and friends pay tribute to John Cage (Washington Post, September 7)

Program note writer Erik Ulmann quoted Descharmes, writing that he spent a July evening "eating mushrooms" while preparing for this Cage evening, and that it was then that he came upon the Richter retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. There is an authenticity in Descharmes's magic mushroom consumption when planning a Cage evening, though who knows if Descharmes actually gently picked the shrooms off of cow dung in green farmland as Cage, a renowned mycologist, may have done, or obtained them from less earthy sources. No matter the caliber of one's ears and listening experience, this repertoire is challenging. Imagining the aid of having consumed magic mushrooms prior to listening to seemingly randomized cello scratches by Descharmes interspersed with snare drum stick taps on the stick holding up the piano lid by and other interesting techniques by Steven Schick in Cage's Etudes Boréales gives one the feeling of hope that it is possible to be in the know. Indeed, we too may be able to understand Cage's music, and even the painful fingers scratching-down-the-chalkboard, spine-twinging disharmony of Klaus Huber's ...ruhe sanft... for cello, recorded cello, and a few recorded words, by listening after eating magic mushrooms. The key being to be mentally distorted by an organic drug before experiencing the intentional aural brutality of some of this repertoire. I look forward to comments from readers who have experimented with Cage avec champignons.

NOI New Lights

Classical music, as we all know, is dying. Greg Sandow, the self-appointed Dark Horseman of this particular tribulation, stands regularly on the virtual street corner, proclaiming that the terminal patient is finished unless we encourage applause between movements, unless we program more contemporary music, unless classical institutions undo everything they have done until now and embrace popular culture, unless -- whatever. While hammering home the details of this devastating illness, he also offers a miracle cure -- workshops for musicians to brand themselves, consultation services to help ensembles bring that elusive young audience into the hall.

This is not to say that classical music does not need to change and evolve, or that Greg Sandow's ideas are not worth musicians pursuing -- only that one tires of the apocalypse. After all, at least since Monteverdi, musicians or critics have been declaring that the true art is dead. What strikes me when attending a performance that supposedly represents the salvation of classical music is that audiences do exactly what they do in the concert hall under normal circumstances: they listen in silence. That is what we are supposed to do with this music we love so much, give it all of our attention. The New Lights concert, offered every year (2011, 2010, 2009) by the participants in the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland, provides the chance for performers to "explore unconventional performance practice, technology and other artistic disciplines." The latest installment, heard on Thursday night at the Clarice Smith Center, experimented with only the first one from that list, but it was another chance to appreciate some of the ways that musicians can be innovative. It is always good to experience something new, but if all concerts followed this kind of format, I would probably stop going to them.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, National Orchestral Institute at Strathmore (The Washington Post, June 30) Andrew Lindemann Malone, 45-Minute Workout: National Orchestral Institute and Festival’s “New Lights” Chamber Concert (DMV Classical, July 1)

The principal benefit was compactness, with a program that lasted 45 minutes without an intermission. A single movement of Bach's second Brandenburg concerto -- with the odd substitution of marimba for trumpet -- opened the concert, ending with a sort of audio rewind effect as the final chord glissandoed upward. The Bach's corresponding book end was Paul Moravec's Brandenburg Gate, composed in 2008 for (almost) the same forces as Bach's second Brandenburg concerto (including the trumpet left out of the Bach), as part of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's Brandenburg project. Moravec's piece, the most substantial work on the program, gave tribute to Bach -- in its use of repetition, rhythmic drive, and an almost-obsessive quotation of the B-A-C-H motif. In both pieces, the young musicians played with élan and athleticism, even without a conductor -- something that they coached with members of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to learn how to do. In the middle was a screeching, unpleasant performance of the second movement of John Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts, played from an upper balcony, and a ruminative (in the cud-chewing sense) Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt, with an antiphonal alternation of instruments on the stage and others in the upper balconies. Two improvisational exercises were included -- one involving clapping that opened the performance, and another involving voices singing in a cluster (a common vocal warm-up used by actors) that connected the Pärt to the Moravec.

Arditti Quartet's Cage Rattling

Berg, String Quartet, op. 3 / Lyric Suite, Arditti Quartet Bartók, String Quartet No. 4 (inter alia), Arditti Quartet

You can count on the Arditti Quartet to program modern music you are unlikely to hear anywhere else, or at least very rarely. Their marathon program at the Library of Congress last night was no exception. With five dense, often dissonant works on offer, it was no surprise that an unexpectedly full house gradually emptied over the course of the three-hour performance. The evening need not have been so long: two pieces, performed less ideally, could easily have been excised, sparing both performers and audience.

One of the high points was Alban Berg's string quartet, op. 3, where the tendency of the musicians, especially first violinist (and sole remaining founding member) Irvine Arditti, toward sour intonation mattered less. The Arditti modus operandi is to play every piece to the hilt, pushing the edge of tempo choice, dynamic contrast, and forceful tone. It served Berg quite well, as in the evocative slow section of the first movement, where a vocabulary of scratches, peeps, whines, buzzes, whistles, and whirs was deployed to full effect. The second movement opened with howls of anger, succeeded by a sultry con sordini section, full of ardent beauty.

The other reason to praise this concert was the chance to hear the new string quartet by British composer Thomas Adès. Called Four Quarters, it was premiered last year by the Emerson Quartet. (Emerson violinist Eugene Drucker has published some thoughts on the work.) The music of Adès continues to impress me, incorporating and building upon many of the mathematical and atonal ideas of the last century but in ways that are much more interesting to both mind and ear than its models. The first movement, Nightfalls, is built out of repeated motif fragments forming open intervals, triads that coalesce amid dissonances, only to be dissected again to reveal ideas voice by voice, in a sort of Klangfarbenmelodie. Pitches rose and fell, creating a sense of brightness or darkness, until the whole structure vanished al niente, with high flautando notes from the violins. Pizzicato notes high on the strings created a sense of the chaotic splash of water drops in the second movement, Serenade: Morning Dew, with violist Ralf Ehlers conducting the multimetric shifts with the neck of his instrument. In the midst of this "scherzo" a trio of arco sounds is interposed, with the return of the pizzicato coming together as a unison melody before evaporating.

The third movement, Days, is centered on an ostinato figure, again made irregular by the addition of stray beats here and there, that starts in the second violin, passing to the viola, and ultimately taken up by all four instruments in obsessive agitation mid-movement. Luscious, quasi-tonal chords hover around that ostinato, as do ecstatic little decorations toward the end of this compact movement. The fourth movement, The 25th Hour, is set in an extremely complex meter, 25/16, the chaotic, extra-temporal backdrop for a game of glassy harmonics alternating with regular notes in the two violins. Drucker has written that Adès was "imagining a kind of yodeling effect," which is another example of Adès being able to uncover new sounds and textures, always surprising and keeping his ideas compressed so that they are fully formed and yet not overworked.

The concert actually had to begin an hour early to accommodate the opening work, John Cage's Two⁴ for Violin and Piano or Sho. Commissioned by the McKim Fund at the Library of Congress (the manuscript and finished score were on display in the entry hall), this is a piece in Cage's late style, jettisoning the idea of metrical rhythm for that of mathematical duration. Pianist Stephen Drury, who premiered the work with violinist Paul Zukofsky at the Library in 1991, returned for this performance, in honor of the Cage centenary (he was born on September 5, 1912). In the same way that some in the art world take the anti-art posturing of an artist like Marcel Duchamp far too seriously, Cage is revered among modern musicians. His experiments with aleatory techniques and the boundaries of sound and silence have had a profound influence, it is true, but it is disingenuous not at least to acknowledge that his music, in actual practice, can be annoyingly unbearable.

That was certainly the case with this work, forty minutes of pianissimo drones -- clusters of various kinds in the piano, scratchy microtonal long notes from Irvine Arditti's violin -- that is like listening to paint dry, the soundtrack of almost-silence in a mostly empty Zen garden. It is, quite intentionally, anti-music, exploding conventions of rhythm, pitch, melody, pretty much everything that we enjoy about listening to music. It is the sort of thing that I am glad at least to say that I have experienced, no matter how unpleasant, but that I never wish to hear again. The unplanned chronometer malfunction -- Arditti's stopwatch (the note changes are indicated to occur within certain ranges of the piece's overall duration) went off as a timer alarm, aborting the first attempt at performing the work -- was the sort of unpredictable mishap that Cage likely would have enjoyed. It was also an important reminder not to treat the music of this mischievous trickster too seriously.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, Arditti Quartet runs emotional gamut in marathon concert (Washington Post, April 12)

The other two works should have been excised from the program, which would have made for a concert of more or less normal length. Beethoven's Große Fuge, op. 133, is something that the Arditti Quartet is known for playing, but their performance last night was so unpleasant that the point it made -- late Beethoven has something in common with dense modern music -- was hardly worth making. Arditti really squealed on the high bits of the first violin part, and overall intonation was often dolorous. The fast sections almost pulled away to shreds because of the group's tendency toward excessive speed and hammered attacks. The group has a unique approach to Bartók, but their performance of the Hungarian composer's Quartet no. 4 suffered by comparison to that heard just last month from the Takács Quartet (listen to the work as recorded by the Keller Quartet). The fast movements were taken so quickly that many of the motifs never fully registered on the ear, making the piece more a series of textural effects, oddly smoothing out its rough edges by glossing over them. The heart of the piece, the third movement, had the feel more of operatic recitative than folk music in the cello and violin solos. If you thought that after three hours of 20th-century music, an encore would be out of the question, you would be wrong: the evening finally came to an end with one of Conlon Nancarrow's deranged Studies For Player Piano, arranged for string quartet by Paul Usher.

String Quartet Week continues with two concerts by the Quatuor Diotima, on Thursday with an all-contemporary program at La Maison Française (April 12, 7:30 pm) and on Friday with more historical fare at the Library of Congress (April 13, 8 pm).

Seasons Come, Seasons Go

C. Simpson, Seasons: Winter (inter alia), S. Watillon et al. Cage, Seasons, American Composers Orchestra. D. R. Davies A. Vivaldi, Seasons, Concerto Italiano, R. Alessandrini P. D. Q. Bach, Seasonings, Royal P.D.Q. Bach Festival Orchestra, J. Mester

The Folger Consort's annual New Year concert, in the crossing of Washington National Cathedral, is a pleasing way to break the holiday concert fast each January. After recent programs centered on Monteverdi (the 1610 Vespers, in 2010), Vivaldi (2009), Victoria (2008), Dowland and Bird (2007), and Palestrina and Monteverdi (2006), this year's program brought together three rather different cycles of pieces depicting the four seasons -- the omnipresent one by Antonio Vivaldi, introduced by excerpts from sets by English viola da gambist and composer Christopher Simpson (c. 1602-1669) and modern American composer John Cage. It was the Cage piece, a short ballet score, that determined the form of the concert, which presented the three works grouped together by season. Cage's first work for orchestra, premiered with choreography by Merce Cunningham in 1947, begins with winter and proceeds through spring, summer, and fall before returning cyclically to the winter music. That this program was presented in that very season was a satisfying alignment of life and art.

Cage completed two versions of the score, for piano and full orchestra, which Folger Consort director Christopher Kendall, Olin Johannessen, and others arranged for the same Baroque string ensemble required for the Vivaldi concertos, plus synthesizer and percussion. As is always the case with such a reduction, not everything from Cage's score could be incorporated, but the result was something even more ethereal and atmospheric than Cage's orchestration. Repetitive, quasi-dissonant washes of sound in a sort of Klangfarbenmelodie style, reminiscent of Webern but with a touch of Broadway, evoked a sort of meditative melancholy. This repetition of pre-determined musical ideas, which Cage called gamuts, created the harmonic stasis he so admired in the music of Erik Satie: not surprisingly, Cage indulged in no cheap references to Vivaldi's famous precursor, as Piazzola did in Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, for example. The longest movement, Summer, which Cage said was associated with preservation (following an Indian tradition of the cycle of the seasons), had a particularly nostalgic tone, the tinges of marimba and vibraphone sounding like a half-remembered steel drum or calliope.

A chamber-sized ensemble of violin, two viols, chamber organ, and theorbo played only the initial Fancy movement of each of the Simpson pieces, making a rather small sound for the cathedral's vast acoustic. Nothing about any of these little showpieces seemed overtly programmatic, but their contrasting sections of varied character made intriguing introductions to the more substantial Cage-Vivaldi pairings. What likely brought most of the albeit somewhat sparse audience to the concert, those overplayed Vivaldi concertos, was the least exciting part of the evening. Violinist Julie Andrijeski was more graceful than dazzling on the solo parts, with the cuckoo runs in the first movement of Summer and the double-stops in the first movement of Autumn going a little sour. She was at her best in the slow movements, mostly taken at brisk tempi but with stylistically tasteful ornaments added on repeats of the melody.

Other Reviews: Joe Banno, Folger Consort (Washington Post, January 10)

Likewise, the string ensemble played the descriptive possibilities of the concertos close to the vest, by comparison to the closest reading of the score's accompanying sonnets, by Concerto Italiano. Spring's dogs, summer's insects, and winter's cracking ice were all on the timid side, although Andrijeski's joke in the first movement of Fall, pretending to fall asleep before the return of the final ritornello, came directly from the sonnet. Harpsichordist Joseph Gascho took advantage of the largely static slow movement of the last concerto to add vivid figuration to the continuo part, one of the highlights of the evening.

This performance will be repeated this evening (January 8, 8 pm), in Washington National Cathedral. For its next program, Ecco la primavera, the Folger Consort joins with the vocal ensemble Trefoil (March 11 to 13).

Cage Inspires Art

Su-Mei Tse, Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (2001, Collection Frac Lorraine)

The Fonds régional d'art contemporain (FRAC Lorraine), a contemporary art museum in the French city of Metz, has teamed up with the Ecole supérieure d'art de Metz Métropole to present an exhibit that combines music and art in intriguing ways. In Listen to Your Eyes artists have created works in response to the work of American composer John Cage. Véronique Mortaigne has a report (Le son, les images et le silence, March 20) in Le Monde (my translation):

Dutch artist Manon de Boer (b. 1965) conceived Two Times 4'33" in 2008, a video reinterpretation of one of Cage's most controversial works. A pianist performs, without playing, the sole line of the score that the composer marked with three signs. For Cage, environmental sounds and the laws of chance created the music, and Manon de Boer superimpose that plan and the piano's silence onto an intense sonic activity (wind, cars, etc.). The work is intelligent, like that of Artur Zmijewski, The Singing Lesson I (2001): fourteen minutes of choral music sung by deaf children, who go off key, emit growls and screeches, with a happiness that contrasts with the discomfort that the listener-viewer may experience. Aesthetic ideals of beauty can also be used to exclude, says the Polish artist.

The Danish artist Eva Koch, in Approach (2005), has reconfigured lines from Dante's Commedia, read by an actor on an audio track on one side, and in images on the other, with silent actors declaiming Dante in sign language. Music is a cycle, and the Lithuanian Zilvinas Kempinas represents that with three fans pasting to the wall three magnetic tapes glued in a circle and left to unroll at liberty. At the Ecole supérieure d'art, by the same logic, Mozart's Turkish march, played on a piano without strings and filmed by the Lebanese artist Ziad Antar, is accompanied by engravings by Aurélie Nemours, the vertical and horizontal abstraction in black and white depicting the rhythm.

This exhibit is part of a series called Diagonales, an exploration of the relationships between sound and the plastic arts lasting through next January throughout France, with exhibits in Bourges (La Box, March 26 to April 18), Nevers (Médiathèque Jean-Jaurès, at the same time), Paris (Le Centquatre, May 7 to 9), and Arles (the Musée Réatu, July 3 to October 31), among others. Cage was also recently the subject of an exhibit at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Su-Mei Tse, the Japanese artist whose video is shown in the still reproduced here (bandaged hands playing one of Bach's preludes), has had music figure in many of her works (La Marionnette, L'Echo): see several images in this profile.

DCist: Leipzig Quartet's Zen Moment

The best part of the program was saved for last, a rare performance of John Cage's Music for Four, an exercise in noise and tedium premiered by the Arditti Quartet at Wesleyan University (where else?) in the late 1980s. This aleatory work consists of four parts for the instruments of the string quartet, layered together at random intervals by the players, who are supposed to be separated from one another at some distance, to allow the audience to hear each part independently. The Leipzigers opted to set themselves up in the entrance to the museum's main floor, with cellist Matthias Moosdorf in the stairwell by the door, violist Ivo Bauer at the top of the stairs, and violinists Stefan Arzberger and Tilman Büning at opposing ends of the hallway. This decision was sprung on the series director, Michael Wilpers, only a couple hours before the concert, forcing him to arrange hastily for the extra security needed to make it happen.

The performers instructed the audience to move about the entire floor, to hear the music from different angles, and the resulting noise of shuffling feet, cameras clicking, and whispering became, in good Cagean tradition, part of the performance. The sound carried throughout the stone-floored exhibition space, allowing one to stroll about taking in the Freer's exquisite collection of Chinese landscapes of wandering philosophers, Japanese screens and guardian statues, Buddhist statues, calligraphy, and pottery, with the formless blocks of sound, streaked pen-like into the space and then vanishing, providing a sonic backdrop.

A Zen Evening at the Freer (DCist, March 12)


Violinist Tilman Büning, Freer Gallery of Art (photo by Neil Greentree), with Yours Truly at left, wearing scarf
UPDATE:
Joan Reinthaler, Sounds of Silence at the Freer (Washington Post, March 14)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Maison Française

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is another Ionarts favorite. Since winning the Olivier Messiaen Competition in 1973 and becoming a founding member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Pierre Boulez, Aimard has been a champion of contemporary music. As he showed yet again in a Monday evening recital at La Maison Française, it is not just that he plays contemporary music in all styles but also that he plays it so well, so musically, with such understanding. Aimard's recording of the Ives Concord Sonata, for example, lays bare the structure and sense of one of the most complex pieces of the 20th century. Aimard does more than champion: his playing of contemporary music can proselytize.

This was at least part of the goal of this kaleidoscopic and enigmatic recital, a selection of 40-some short pieces and excerpts of longer pieces, played without intermission. With microphone in hand, Aimard guided us through the five sets he had constructed, in a collage-montage, a "game" to bring together different pieces, that perhaps should not be put together, to create a mosaic or patchwork. With masterful technique and a sure-footed sense of musical shape, Aimard gave life to this Frankenstein monster, which unlike Mary Shelley's horrific creation was more beautiful as a patchwork than any of its single component parts.

The first section, Prélude Elémentaire, dealt with the basics of sound, opening with pieces by Ligeti and Bartók that developed extensively through repetitions of a single note. This blossomed into a pair of pieces, by Schoenberg and Bartók, based on thirds, and finally into pieces by Webern and Boulez in the 12-tone style. A "slow movement" that explored the extremes of expressivity and ambiguity called Sostenuto followed, with highlights including a Scriabin prelude, the Janáček Intermezzo erotico, and especially Marco Stroppa's Ninna-nanna from Miniature Estrose (1991-95), a work based on tremulo figures and Doppler effects. In that setting, the 20th variation of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations almost sounded atonal.

This was the stunning effect of Aimard's juxtaposition of atonal and tonal selections, so that the end of one dovetailed perfectly with the next, often pivoting on the same note or chord. This was most striking in the third section, Intermezzo zodiacal, where Romantic sublimations of country dances like the Ländler, mostly by Schubert, alternated with movements from Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zodiac. (Was it a coincidence that this suite of pairings ended with the Virgo movements, which happens to be Aimard's astrological sign?) No matter how far toward the fluffy Romantic stereotype the selection went, even Liadov's A Musical Snuffbox and an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, the pattern made Stockhausen seem only a step away.

Other Reviews: Cecelia Porter, An Amalgam Of Composers, One Insightful Whole (Washington Post, May 9) Anthony Tommasini, At Carnegie Hall, the pianist Aimard creates unorthodox connections (New York Times, May 15)

The evening closed with a scherzo-type movement called Capriccio and a tribute to musical farewells, Cloches d'adieu. In the former, Beethoven bagatelles battled with flighty works by Stockhausen, Scarlatti, and John Cage. In a tribute to the experimental leanings of a previous age, Aimard included the mysterious Sphinxes movement from Schumann's Carnaval, by pressing down the keys corresponding to the notated pitches in the composer's formula, without allowing the strings to make any sound. (John Cage probably would have approved of the extended cell phone ring that interrupted much of this section of the concert, as always with concert-destroying sounds set to the most ridiculous melody one could imagine.)

Bells that bid adieu included Schoenberg's farewell to his teacher, Mahler; Kurtág's tribute to the musicologist Lászlo Dobszáy; and Tristan Murail's farewell to his teacher, Messiaen, based in turn on Messiaen's anguished piece on the death of his mother. The violet-orange dissonance in the Messiaen excerpt meshed so perfectly with the extended harmony in an excerpt of Ravel's Gibet from Gaspard de la nuit, that the listener was forcably reminded just how close the sound worlds of those two composers really are. So as not to leave us with the grim sounds of the clanging death knell and the slithering chords of the gallows, Aimard closed with an excerpt from the Great Gate of Kiev movement from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Although it struck me that Debussy's prelude La cathédrale engloutie would have served aptly as an encore on the theme of tintinnabulation, Aimard was not tempted to add another word to his powerful discourse.

The 2008 season at La Maison Française, while not yet fully announced, will include a performance by Les Folies Françoises and a solo recital by Alexandre Tharaud, both postponed from this year's season. This month's remaining concert is a recital by violist Roger Tapping and pianist Judith Gordon (May 24, 7:30 pm).